Chapter 5

98. And not among our soft-flowing rivers only; but here among the torrents of the Great Chartreuse, where another man would assuredly have drawn the monastery, Turner only draws their working mill. And here I am able to show you, fortunately, one of his works painted at this time of his most earnest thought; when his imagination was still freshly filled with the Greek mythology, and he saw for the first time with his own eyes the clouds come down upon the actual earth.

99. The scene is one which, in old times of Swiss traveling, you would all have known well; a little cascade which descends to the road from Geneva to Chamouni, near the village of Maglans, from under a subordinate ridge of the Aiguille de Varens, known as the Aiguillette. You, none of you, probably, know the scene now; for your only object is to get to Chamouni and up Mont Blanc and down again; but the Valley of Cluse, if you knew it, is worth many Chamounis; and it impressed Turner profoundly. The facts of the spot are here given in mere and pure simplicity; a quite unpicturesque bridge, a few trees partly stunted and blasted by the violence of the torrent in storm at their roots, a cottage with its mill-wheel--this has lately been pulled down to widen the road--and the brook shed from the rocks and finding its way to join the Arve. The scene is absolutely Arcadian. All the traditions of the Greek Hills, in their purity, were founded on such rocks and shadows as these; and Turner has given you the birth of the Shepherd Hermes on Cyllene, in its visible and solemn presence, the white cloud, Hermes Eriophoros forming out of heaven upon the Hills; the brook, distilled from it, as the type of human life, born of the cloud and vanishing into the cloud, led down by the haunting Hermes among the ravines; and then, like the reflection of the cloud itself, the white sheep, with the dog of Argus guarding them, drinking from the stream.

100. And now, do you see why I gave you, for the beginning of your types of landscape thought, that "Junction of Tees and Greta" in their misty ravines; and this glen of the Greta above, in which Turner has indeed done his best to paint the trees that live again after their autumn--the twilight that will rise again with twilight of dawn--the stream that flows always, and the resting on the cliffs of the clouds that return if they vanish; but of human life, he says, a boy climbing among the trees for his entangled kite, and these white stones in the mountain churchyard, show forth all the strength and all the end.

101. You think that saying of the Greek school--Pindar's summary of it, "[Greek: ti de tis; ti d'ou tis];"[15]--a sorrowful and degrading lesson. See at least, then, that you reach the level of such degradation. See that your lives be in nothing worse than a boy's climbing for his entangled kite. It will be well for you if you join not with those who instead of kites fly falcons; who instead of obeying the last words of the great Cloud-Shepherd--to feed his sheep, live the lives--how much less than vanity!--of the war-wolf and the gier-eagle. Or, do you think it a dishonor to man to say to him that Death is but only Rest? See that when it draws near to you, you may look to it, at least for sweetness of Rest; and that you recognize the Lord of Death coming to you as a Shepherd gathering you into his Fold for the night.

[Footnote 15: Pyth. viii. 95. (135.)]